Yi Hui is a final year Digital Animation student at the NTU School of Art, Design & Media. CMYK is her first independent short film. It won the Public Award (local selection) at the 2010 Very Short International Film Festival in Singapore, and came in third at the SPACETIME 2010 Animation Competition and exhibition at the SIGGRAPH Conference in Los Angeles.

“I am attracted to animation because it gives me a lot joy and satisfaction to see my characters coming to life, and to see that the audience enjoys my work. I think part of me wants to become an actor although I might be shy in front of an audience, so my character acts for me. When I animate, I feel for my characters and often find myself subconsciously acting out the scene with them. My works are mostly 3D-based because currently, this is the medium I can best express myself in. Ultimately, it is finding a way to best tell the story. Animation is a very imaginative art form in itself and I hope that my work can bring the audience to new ‘worlds’ they never knew or thought of before.”

CMYK is a humorous take on the theory of subtractive color mixing. The story idea was actually conceived from a technique before concept method. “I was working on a research project that explores the fusion of abstract fine art painting with computer animation” Yi Hui continues, “and had wanted to think of an idea that will enable me to make use of some of the techniques that I had experimented with, in particular that of splashing paint. Then came the idea for CMYK. I had very little time for preproduction so the look of the film was developed along the way during production as I was working and experimenting at the same time. Thus ‘chance’ also has a part to play in the development of this short.”